FreePBX v2 and v3 Release Candidate Status

Progress on both the 2.7.0beta1 and v3 General Preview release candidate have been going great with lots of activity. The 2.7 beta will be moved into release candidate state this week along with an upgrade module provided to upgrade from 2.6 systems for those who prefer to use the GUI and stay clear of tarballs and SSH.

First off a quick comment on the v3 repository that was down for a couple of days last week. We had some data corruption on the server which resulted in the change history lost but all the code is still there. This means that if you had previously checked out code in an SVN working set, you will have to check it out again, you won’t be able to update as you will be out of sync. We have put in measures to avoid lost change history in the SVN repositories going forward.

On the 2.7 Release Candidate front, the main additions were covered in an earlier blog post where we highlighted the changes to faxing and discussed some upcoming Queues and Backup module changes. The highlights are available on the 2.7 Milestone Summary. We covered the fax changes in the other blog post and have gotten some good testing across multiple Asterisk versions. Between deprecated Asterisk changes across 1.2, 1.4 and 1.6+, different application names and multipe fax reception modules (spandsp vs. FFA) it has taken a few iterations to get it all right!

The updates to the Queues module are in and tested. The most interesting change being the ability to pre-assign queue agent penalties to dynamic agents which was previously only available for static agents. In conjunction with this, we’ve also added the ability to restrict dynamic agents to only those listed in the queue configuration. Both of these capabilities are long standing requests and we hope they are well received by everyone.

The updates to the Backup module was largely taking several already existing but little known capabilities and enabling them within the GUI and enabling them to be set per-backup set. This includes the ability to move backup sets off to a remote server using either FTP or SCP. There is also the ability to add other files on your system to the backup sets and if the backup set is restored, they will also be restored. (Previously there was limited ability to add other directories, and they would not be restored through the GUI).

Both of these additions as well as the FAX module changes were largely contributed by development resources from Schmoozecom.com developers who have been significant contributors for many years to the FreePBX project!

A few other capabilities were also added as well as plenty of bug fixes as always. I’ll let those curious parties poke around or dig through the SVN changes to see what else has been provided.

The v3 General Preview release candidate is going strong as mentioned above. I’ll get a more detailed update shortly on it’s own blog so we can give you a better idea of what is to come.